Background
to Writing
UNIT
1.1
Common types of academic writing
Writers should be clear why they are writing. The most common reasons for writing include:
- to answer a question the writer has been given or chosen
- to report a piece of research the writer has conducted
- to synthesise research done by others on a topic.
Can you suggest any other reasons?
Whatever the purpose, it is helpful to think about the probable readers of your work. How
can you explain your ideas to them effectively? Although there is no fixed standard of academic
writing, it is clearly different from the written style of newspapers or novels. For example, it
is generally agreed that academic writing attempts to be impersonal and objective. What are
its other features?
Most business schools assess students mainly through written assignments. These
include coursework, which may take weeks to write, and exam answers, which often
have to be written in an hour or less. This unit deals with:- the names of different writing tasks
- the format of long and short written texts
- the structure of sentences and paragraphs.